Line spacing in notes

Is there any way to influence the line spacing in notes. There are some options to change the typography, but this extremely important option seems to be missing. Am I missing something here?

DEVONthink supports multiple document formats, which one do you actually use for your notes?

If you’re using markdown or formatted notes you can use CSS to set the line-height

I use RTF, formatted and html

Same here,
is there really no way to change line spacing in RTF or formatted Notes?
It seems that it may alter accidently by changing font sizes and my only solution is to copy in a new note while loosing all previous formatting…
Am I missing something?

I think that might be considered a feature, depending on the circumstances. When you increase the font size from 12 to 24 points, you probably wouldn’t want the line spacing to remain at 12 points.

Back to your question: RTF does probably provide for line spacing. The question is, if your RTF authoring tool(s) give you access to it.

Formatted notes are basically HTML, and line spacing is determined by CSS. So, it should be feasible to modify (there’s even a CSS property line-height for it).

View > Format Bar and there are certainly controls for the leading in an RTF(D) document…

Thank you very much, this helps, after 2 years daily usage of DT, you showed me the missing Format.
Thought I’ve read the whole documentation, but missed that one …

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Glad you are sorted. Another good practice is to simply explore all the menus. There are many gems that are only discovered by exploring.

What I don’t understand: why is Devontechnologies not able to create a functional and easy to use text editor? Other tools like Evernote, notion, OneNote, Apple Notes can do that too, without having to manipulate the HTML code.

Moreover, the HTML code generated by Devonthink a formatted note is quite a mess and not clean.

While that may be in a certain way “functional”, it is (in my opinion) at best a bad joke for a note-taking app. Unless, of course, you’re happy with using your notes in a silo to which no other app does have access. DT is, in my opinion, not a note-taking app, but a Document Management System with note-taking capabilities. If those are not good enough for you, you can always use another editor and send your note to DT.

“Manipulating” HTML is necessary for notes taken in HTML. Not for other formats. But for HTML it is indispensable – how else would you take the note in that format if not by “manipulating” the HTML?

What exactly are you referring to? “not clean” is a very broad term.

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The main problem I see that across devices (iphone,ipad,desktop) you have no chance to edit notes in any way equivalent (size, font style, color etc). If I was only using Devonthink on desktop this would be acceptable to me, but since I use Devonthink on multiple platforms it would be great if there was a way to edit notes consistently. Perhaps Devonthink could develop an internal format here to allow this (like Evernote).

Here is an example code from a formatted notice:

The HTML source is actually a stripped version of the code produced by the WebKit framework on macOS. And the BASE tag is an unnecessary relict that will be stripped by the next release too.

What is “not clean” about this HTML? I guess (you didn’t say so) that it has been converted from another format. One could argue about the &nbsp;<br></div>, but that would be nit-picking.

If you’re referring to the embedded styles (again: since you didn’t say so, I have to guess): that is perfectly OK, especially for HTML converted from another format. The alternative would be to generate an external stylesheet, which you’d then have to take care of as well. And doing that for a stupid format like RTF would be a programming nightmare – RTF hardly supports styles (yes, yes, I know it does theoretically), converting this mess to a structured format like HTML+CSS would drive anyone nuts.

If you’re referring to the stuff not being very legible (you didn’t mention that, either) because of missing line breaks etc: That’s not relevant for the question of “cleanliness”. The browser is supposed to read HTML, not humans. And if you absolutely want to have a nicer view of it, load it into your browser and have a look at the inspector in its developer tools.

To post code, (which would have been nicer in this case), include it in three backticks liek so
```
code goes here
```

This may be possible, but one has to take extreme care of what one uses and how. You can get close to that with Markdown and a properly built CSS that is available on all platforms. But “close” is the best you can achieve, ever. If you choose Calibre for your font on the desktop – is that even available on mobile? If you carefully select a color on mobile, why would your monitor with its completely different hardware display it exactly the same (especially if both screens are not calibrated)? If you need WYSIWYG (for notes? really?), use a WYSIWYG format like PDF, Pages, Word. And we’ve been over that numerous times already – there is no silver bullet in document formats.

Which then can forever only be read by DT(TG)? Let’s please not go back to the old days of proprietary formats, protocols, extensions to programming languages – we’ve been bitten by that enough.

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These are good arguments. Thank you very much!

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